At Your service By Teodros Kiros

The music roars on, as teenage girls ranging for 13 to 19 are surveying the evening scene in a dimly lit disco, which calls itself, Kokeb, in the city of Addis.

Teddy Afro’s music is blasting inside and customers are dancing away, including expatriates with heavy Europeans accents, and the young girls are charming them .Cruising on high heels and miniskirts which barely covers their upper legs, the girls are hyper visible and there are at least fifty of them. As you walk by, some of them aggressively grab you and insist that you talk to them. They are hardly afraid to express themselves.

One young girl, small, nicely proportioned, did not seem to fit the scene. Her quite demeanor stood out, as different, a sort of shy, and mildly depressed.

She sat alone at first. The she walked outside, with a cigarette, puffing away and looking up at the galaxies and talking to herself. A few minutes after, a young man in his late thirties, on a kaki trouser and a white calving Klein shirt, tall, slim with large eyes follows her.

He too stood out in the crowd, and looked a sort of lost and inside his head. He stood a few yards away from her, gazing at the dark night and smoking away. They exchanged glances, only ones, and each decided to stay inside their heads.

She was about to walk back to the bar, but the young man asked for her attention, and she generously returned it. They exchanged their names and began telling their stores, and discovered that she is a graduate on Addis Ababa university and that he lives in Denmark and now he is visiting with his ailing mother for one more month.

“ I am not very expensive, if you are interested, and I am at your service“, she said.

He replied

“ I am not really into that, but would like to know more about
you “

“ What is there to know about a whore?” she said.

“ You are not just a whore but an educated person, in a bad situation”, he
retorted.

“ I am shocked that you are talking to me. I am not used to that. Normally I am grabbed like a ball, toasted and turned under dirty linen and then thrown away.
No body knows my name”, she said.

“ Well. I am not like that. By the way I like your eyes and your voice”, he said.

She smiled, as she thanked him.
“ I was an excellent student at the university and was president of the English debating club, but then life dimmed on me, and could not find a job and now this filthy life, which I have been doing for two years, and there are so many of us, as you can see at the bar,” she said.

He fought his tears, and he said, “ there may be a way out. Can we meet tomorrow at city café? he asked her, and they agreed to meet the next day.